International Farmer Field Schools Specialist

Through its Country Offices, or FAO Representations, FAO assists governments to develop policies, programmes and projects to address hunger and malnutrition, and provides technical support for the sustainable development of their agricultural, fisheries and forestry sectors and to respond to crises. The international farmer field school (FFS) specialist will be hired under project GCP/MLW/072/EC - KULIMA; Revitalizing agricultural clusters and Ulimi wa Mdandanda through Farmer field schools in Malawi, a 5 year project in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development, Malawi funded by the European Union. The main project objective is to promote sustainable agricultural growth and incomes to enhance food and nutrition security in Malawi within the context of a changing climate. This action has been conceived to support the District Agricultural Extension Services System (DAESS) to ensure sustainable increase of agricultural productivity and diversified production. This will be attained through building capacity of a pool of FFS Master Trainers and community based facilitators to be drawn from selected farming communities. The availability of highly qualified FFS Master Trainers and Community Based facilitators will facilitate the overall empowerment of the farmers to address the various issues affecting the production, productivity, nutrition and access to market.

Reporting Lines

The International FFS Specialist will be under the overall supervision of the FAO Representative in Malawi and the direct operational supervision of KULIMA Chief Technical Advisor and he or she will work in close collaboration with the KULIMA co-Facilitators; resilience Pillar Technical Advisor and the Assistant FAO Representative (Programme).

The International FFS Specialist will be responsible for conducting Farmer Field School Master Trainers’ Courses for KULIMA Extension Workers and oversee the Training of facilitators’ courses for Community Based Facilitators.  The training will be intensive and full of practical sessions (65%), theory (25%) and outreach (10%). The participants will be systematically taken through various concepts and tools with emphasis on relating their applicability in their own local context. In addition to the traditional FFS agroecosystem based content on sustainable good agricultural husbandry/practices, natural resources management and innovative adaptations to climate change, purposive inclusions will be made to broaden the MT course curriculum to include modules on nutrition sensitive agriculture; Farmer Business School (FBS) - entrepreneurial skills development and farming as a business (enterprise selection, gross margin analysis, profitability analysis, farm budgets, enterprise planning, cost benefit analysis and enterprise records); post-harvest handling; marketing and value chain analysis; savings mobilization and key cross cutting issues.

The incumbent will work more specifically\:

• contribute to developing standard operating procedures/guidelines for implementing FFS within the framework of DAESS;
• provide guidance and support Implementing Partners to carry out participatory community action planning processes for prioritising interventions to be undertaken in the FFS community outreach;
• adapt existing Master Trainers’ training curricular and materials to Malawi context and tailor existing Training of Facilitators curricular to respective agro-ecological needs;
• support DAES in establishing and operationalising a quality assurance strategy with a participatory monitoring, evaluation and learning framework;
• design season-long MT courses including, but not limited to, theory of the FFS methodology and practice, practical and community outreach;
• design and set up field studies (experiments/validation/comparative) with clear objectives, parameters for observation, protocols for analysis etc.;
• carry out hands-on mentoring of participants on the FFS methodology and various tools including agro ecosystem analysis (AESA), group dynamics, facilitation skills etc.;
• provide technical guidance to participants on how to design and set up FFS;
• set up practice FFS in communities around the training centres;
• organise field days for the Master trainers course and the community outreach FFS; and
• Perform any other related task requested by the FAO Representative or the Resilience Officer.

• Advanced university degree (for Consultants) / University degree (for PSAs) in Agriculture, natural resources, agronomy, environment management and  rural development 
• Five years of relevant experience in FFS and must have worked in a large and complex International Projects with a particular focus of Farmer Field School.
• Working knowledge of English, French or Spanish and limited knowledge of one of the other two, or of Arabic, Chinese or Russian (for Consultants). Working knowledge of English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian or Chinese (for PSAs)

• Results Focus
• Teamwork
• Communication
• Building Effective Relationships
• Knowledge Sharing and Continuous Improvement

• At least five years’ experience working with local communities in the agricultural sector in Africa
• Demonstrated previous experience working with the field school approach implementation
• Knowledge of FAO FFS methodology is an asset.

 Please note that all candidates should adhere to FAO Values of Commitment to FAO,

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• FAO does not charge a fee at any stage of the recruitment process (application, interview, processing).
• Please note that FAO will only consider academic credentials or degrees obtained from an educational institution recognised in the IAU/UNESCO list.
• Only language proficiency certificates from UN accredited external providers and/or FAO language official examinations (LPE, ILE, LRT) will be accepted as proof of the level of knowledge of languages indicated in the online applications.
• For other issues, visit the FAO employment website\: http\://www.fao.org/employment/home/en/
• For further information on categories, contract duration and honoraria, please refer to the Conditions page.

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